Neil Hughes
Mac sales outgrew the overall PC market for 26 consecutive quarters until December, but Apple is expected to see sales improve in the current quarter.
The Mac's sudden collapse in the December quarter was described as "astonishing" by analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham & Co. on Friday. He noted that Mac shipments fell below PC shipment growth in all geographic regions and segments in the quarter.
"There was absolutely not one iota of positive news in the Mac shipment numbers," Wolf said.
Apple blamed the Mac's poor quarter, in which shipments fell by 22.1 percent year over year, on a lack of availability of the iMac. The new all-in-one desktop went on sale in the month of December, but supply was severely constrained through the end of the quarter, and Apple has still not yet caught up with demand.
However, there are signs that iMac availability is improving, as the NPD Group reported this week that domestic Mac sales were up 31 percent year over year in the month of January. As a result, Wolf believes Apple could be in a position to surpass the overall PC market again in the current March quarter.
Beating the PC market may not even require year over year growth. For example, Mac sales were down 6.1 percent in the third quarter of 2012, but that still managed to outperform the overall PC market, which was down 13.8 percent in the quarter, according to Gartner.
Beyond limited iMac availability, Wolf said that it's likely that a "material percentage of consumers" opted to buy an iPad over a Mac. He also noted that Apple's recent price cuts on its MacBook Pro models with Retina displays are a sign that the company "overestimated the allure" of its high-end notebooks.
Finally, Wolf admitted that Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system will present "a major test" to the Mac, particularly in the business market. He believes the tiled Metro interface employed by Microsoft is a refreshing alternative to the iPhone and Android devices, but said it's an "unanswered question" whether the interface will catch on with desktop PCs.
"It's conceivable that desktop users will eventually fall in love with the new interface," Wolf said. "In the meantime, however, Metro involves a steep learning curve."
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
119 Comments
What a silly article. It was completely attributable to production issues that have since been resolved. Mac sales are going to be great this quarter.
Well, production issue is also a reflection of managament's aptitude on supply chain. Nobody was expecting a thinner iMac. What was sorely needed, however, was an updated iMac with Ivy Bridge and USB3. Apple could have easily jammed those into the existing package, take the time to iron out the production issues on the new chasis and have it ready for Haswell. They chose the hard route and was punished as a reseult. Tim Cook mentioned a backlog of 700,000 iMacs on the quarterly call. I suspect this quarter won't fill all of them.
Supply constraint was predicted by Apple and no one listened. On the other hand, after 25 years of Mac only use, I am buying a couple desktop PC's running Win7. No Mac Pro makes me sad, and an iMac is just a vertical laptop.
What a load of crap! Any analyst with half a brain would understand that due to some supply chain issues which are now completely corrected there was a shifting (not a loss) of revenue from the Dec. quarter to the March quarter. Regardless... the REAL reason for Apples huge stock drive, is now pretty well understood to be caused by the major short selling and gaming that hedge funds were doing pretty much from the Sept. top right through into Jan. If anyone doesn't believe that was the real cause, they simply DO NOT understand how easily stocks CAN be manipulated. We just saw another case of this with that Hedge fund putz Kass's recent Twitter manipulation.
Supply constraint was predicted by Apple and no one listened.
On the other hand, after 25 years of Mac only use, I am buying a couple desktop PC's running Win7. No Mac Pro makes me sad, and an iMac is just a vertical laptop.
And the Mac Pro as well... even though there are rumors they will release it before June. Honestly though, what the f---- is so new and so revolutionary about the new Mac Pro? Top end CPUs, top end graphics, truck load of RAM, massive HDD, multiple SSDs, plenty of expandability... those are plain-to-see requirements for a pro machine. And the fact that the current Mac Pro aren’t selling like hot cakes (I doubt the new one will either), it makes sense for Apple to preannounce it and have it ship later.
What they totally miss is a stable road map. If I buy a workstation from Dell, I know they will come out with a faster version once a new Intel chip is out next year, and the year after next. It’s like clockwork that allows me to plan for a stable upgrade route for my business.